Welcome to the home of Alexander Lane, author of the Nightmare Vacations series and the In Machina trilogy.
Blood River
Getting to the jungle was easy.
Coming home is a killer.
Trapped in the Borneo jungle, British eco-tourist Tara must protect her fellow travellers from a killer possessed by a bloodthirsty animal spirit.
Blood River is available in paperback and DRM-free ebook. It’s also free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
Blood Point
An Irish escape becomes a Midsummer Night’s terror.
Coming Winter 2024.
Widowed Josh plans a birthday trip to Ireland with his daughter Holly and friends. But luxury soon turns to terror as a dark secret emerges from the mysterious Kinnitty Pyramid.
Josh must team up with an unlikely ally to save Holly, facing a final showdown with a vengeful spirit that hungers for power. Even if they succeed, a grim choice awaits – a life forever changed or a sacrifice beyond imagining.
Blood Point is a chilling blend of folk horror and family drama that will haunt you long after the final page.
Blood River & Blood Point cover art by Design for Writers
Space Hippy Brain Stew
From my mind to your mind
The In Machina trilogy
Mecs: Strong. Loyal. Smart enough to do the jobs you hate.
Mecsy Inc promotional slogan, 2120.
In Machina is an epic space opera series with big themes and sassy AIs, for readers of James S A Corey’s The Expanse sequence, Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy and Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries.
The Awakening of William 47 is the first In Machina novel, a story that throws together rogue mec 47 and trouble-dogged human Aisha in a whirlwind escape from Saturn’s moons.
The Flight of the Srama continues 47 and Aisha’s struggles to find freedom and identity in a universe that’s doing its best to silence them.
The choices 47 and Aisha make will decide the fates of humans, mecs and the strange creatures which inhabit the cold depths of the outer planets.
Image credit: Judy Schmidt
More posts from my Space Hippy Brain Stew
Book reviews
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Book vs film: Team Book takes the win
Last week I closed up Book vs Film: a season of reviews comparing eight novels to their big-screen adaptations. The books won, but as the cliché goes, it’s about the journey, not the destination. The working title for this season of The Book Corner was “good book, shit film”. As group-sourced projects often go, not…
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Book vs film: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 8: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones The whimsical beauty of Hayao Miyazaki’s hit 2004 animation of Howl’s Moving Castle has eclipsed the clever fairytale of Diana Wynne Jones’s 1986 novel. Which one’s your favourite? The Book Corner The Book Corner is a regular break…
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Book vs film: The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft
The Book Corner season 5: Book vs film. Episode 7: The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft. Hold on to your sanity for 1927’s The Colour Out Of Space by HP Lovecraft, and its 2019 adaptation starring Nicolas Cage. The Book Corner The Book Corner is a regular break from critiquing for the writing…
Space
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SpaceX caught a rocket!
On October 13th 2024, SpaceX caught a 20-storey booster rocket returning from the edge of space. An hour later, they accurately mock-landed the second-stage spaceship in the Indian Ocean. This was only the fifth test flight of a Starship combo. Spaceflight has long ago passed the Wright Brothers stage of innovation — this is more…
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When the sky came out to play
Last week the sky came out to play, and I crossed off a bucket list item that had begun to feel like a cosmic joke. Now I can say that I have seen an aurora from my front door. In the Noughties, I went to Iceland and Scandinavia in the hope of seeing the Northern…
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The only good gravity is one gravity
Partial gravity — anything that’s not the same as Earth — used to be a special effects expense that no-one wanted. It’s 2024, we have cheap SFX, so why does everywhere in space still look like it’s either zero-g or on Earth? After all, there’s just one place in the universe — our home —…
Writing tips & tools
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How to create Word-friendly headings in Scrivener compile
Scrivener is my go-to writing tool for just about everything1 but it has a weakness: compiling Word documents with built-in headings that make them easy to navigate. Here’s how to solve that problem. I don’t often write about Scrivener because there’s a community of people who really know their way around it, not least the…
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You do not own your AI-generated writing
If you want to publish or submit AI-generated writing, you need to know this: you don’t own that work. No one knows who owns that work. You had an idea and created the prompt that lead to the work, but in the world of intellectual property, ideas are worth nothing. Expression is everything. That’s why…
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If you’re using AI for research, you need to know this
If you’re going to use AI for writing or research, you need to know two things. The first is that AI doesn’t know anything. There are other important things to know about AI. It’s trained on content taken without permission of the creators. It contributes to rising greenhouse emissions and power consumption from technology companies.…
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